Foiye
Foiye is a social entertainment platform offering a unique opportunity for home and design enthusiasts to experience real estate content.
Project Overview
Challenge
Melinda Witmer, CEO and founder of Foiye, created the platform for home enthusiasts that use real estate sites to “dream before they buy.” In alignment with this, the goal of Foiye Home Surf was to give users a home search experience that let them not only discover real estate, but to be entertained and inspired by it — to dream about what “home” might be like for them BEFORE deciding to transact.
I owned the Foiye Home Surf experience from ideation to handoff using an existing design system. I worked directly with stakeholders and developers, including Foiye Founder & CEO Melinda Witmer.
Solution
I designed a media-focused RE listing search that lets users search and browse the same way they would for other inspirational home and design content. I optimized listing detail pages for their entertainment potential for home enthusiasts, and gave RE agents more opportunities to enhance their listings. I also designed a magazine-inspired curation of inspirational properties, organized by popular search categories such as fixer-uppers and historic homes.
Resonating with Home Surf’s design and vision, the MIAMI Association of REALTORS®, the nation’s largest local realtor association, partnered with Foiye to bring its agents and listings to the platform.
Final Screens & Solutions
Search by Features or Keywords
By allowing users to search for listings based on features or keywords rather than location, Foiye Home Surf mirrors how users typically search for inspirational content online. This functionality is especially powerful because Foiye already utilizes technology that generates key terms from text, images, and videos to personalize the content they surface to individual users across the platform, meaning that home search results on Foiye can be generated using all media included in a listing, not just text-based content.
To familiarize users with this novel search approach, a random search term generator was added for a playful introduction to the experience.
View Search Results by Room
It was important that the UX of Home Surf’s search results reflected the goal of treating RE listings as a source of inspirational content, rather than being another transaction-focused home discovery experience. Research showed that users often search for inspirational home and design content by room. To support this experience in Home Surf, a dropdown was added, enabling users to change the thumbnail photo of the search results from the cover to a specific room. This allows users to search for listings by keywords like "waterfront" or "mid-century modern" and view results by room type, aligning with their accustomed browsing style for inspirational content.
Listing Detail Page
The listing detail page aimed to optimize the entertainment potential of RE listings for their massive audience of home enthusiasts. Many RE agents, expressing alignment with this goal, desired opportunities to enhance their MLS listings. What resulted was a media-focused design that enables agents to attach and caption additional media — such as virtual tours and floor plans — as well as illustrate the potential of their listings by cross-linking curated content from other professionals on Foiye, such as interior designers and landscapers.
"For The Love of..."
Another Home Surf offering residing alongside the search feature is “For The Love Of” (FTLO), a collection of inspirational property listings curated by Foiye and displayed in a magazine-inspired format.
The goal of FTLO is to feature exceptional and inspirational RE listings within popular search categories such as ranches, fixer-uppers, and historic homes. Listing agent profile information is highlighted as yet another method of positioning RE professionals as content creators on par with celebrities and brands within the home and design space.